Can’t Spell Love Without the ‘L’

June 11, 2011

Have you seen that commercial in which a guy and a girl see each other from afar on a train, and when they finally come together and make a verbal exchange she says something like, “Where are you getting off?” and he says, “Three stops ago.”?

Awww. So romantic. The venue of that commercial could have been in Chicago. After all, the Chicago Transit Authority’s ‘L’ system is America’s Most Romantic Transit System.

According to a study done by Craigslist, out of the five largest subway or metro systems in the nation, Chicago’s ‘L’ train ranked as the most romantic.

The study looked at 750 stations in Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia and deduced that Chicago’s ‘L’ is most filled with Love.

It’s the train’s stops that put us over the top. Half of the top 10 most romantic individual transit stops in the study were reached by the ‘L.’

Some of our most romantic stops:

*The Belmont Red-Brown-Purple Line station was the most romantic Chicago ‘L’ stop and third overall in the study.

*The Addison Red Line stop next to Wrigley Field came in fifth overall.

*The California Pink Line stop in Little Village ranked sixth.

*The Linden Purple Line terminal in Wilmette came in seventh.

*The Fullerton Red-Brown-Purple Line stop was eighth.

We might have the most romantic railway system, but that doesn’t include the most romantic stop in the country. That designation goes to the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Washington Metro stop in Fairfax County, Va. The second most-romantic stop was the Cecil B. Moore stop on the SEPTA system in Philadelphia.

To figure out the rankings, Craigslist went to its Missed Connections ads. Riders who meet someone interesting on a train but fail to get contact information might post it on the Missed Connections ad available for each station.

By dividing the number of Missed Connections mentioned by the number of average riders for each station, then multiplying by 10,000 and rounding to two decimal places, Craigslist was able to calculate a TRIST for each station, which stands for “train romance index score total.”

On Friday alone, there were more than 100 Missed Connection ads in Chicago.

“There must be something in the air in the Chicago subway system,” said study analyst Peter Freedman, Craigslist’s director of improbable research. “And it’s turning the Windy City into the Flirty City.”